Democracy Project

Advancing Justice-LA pursues the full participation of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities in California democracy by conducting electoral campaigns, advocacy on voting rights and election policy, and community education, organizing, and capacity-building.

Advancing Justice-LA does this work to help Asian American and NHPI communities, in solidarity with other underserved communities, to build power and use it to counter the political marginalization that they face. This marginalization occurs, for example, when elected representatives fail to address the policy needs of underserved communities or when they face ballot measures that undermine opportunity and equity or attack rights and liberties.

Advancing Justice-LA’s Your Vote Matters! campaign is a continuing, nonpartisan project to empower and mobilize community members to make their voice heard at the ballot box. Through multilingual phone calling, mailers, and media outreach, the YVM campaign reaches voters in 12 different languages and from nine ethnicities in Southern California: Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, South Asian, Thai, and Vietnamese. In 2016, Advancing Justice-LA and 20 AANHPI community organizations, along with more than 200 volunteers, made more than 90,000 non-partisan calls in 12 languages to AANHPI voters in Los Angeles and Orange Counties, as well as educated AANHPI voters on key state propositions. We also partnered with several organizations on local and statewide voter guides, including translated Asian-language versions, and helped produce two videos aimed at encouraging AANHPIs to register and to vote.

We’ve partnered with Voter’s Edge California to produce a comprehensive and nonpartisan election guide to make preparing to vote easier and more effective. Our guide provides unbiased, in-depth information on candidates and ballot measures down to the local level – as well as information on how candidates are funded.

Community Engagement Work

In addition to the initiatives highlighted above, Advancing Justice-LA’s Democracy Project carries an ongoing portfolio of work to promote democratic participation by politically marginalized communities:

Community engagement and capacity-building: Advancing Justice-LA conducts an annual organizing academy to train aspiring leaders how to educate and mobilize their communities to build political power and win progressive policy change.

Grassroots organizing: Advancing Justice-LA supports community-led, ground-up efforts to build multi-racial coalitions and hold elected representatives accountable to the needs of underserved communities in the San Gabriel Valley and other Southern California areas.

Our mission is to advocate for civil rights, provide legal services and education, and build coalitions to positively influence and impact Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders and to create a more equitable and harmonious society.